What If Next Year’s Super Bowl Happens During A Blizzard ?

With a blizzard hitting the Eastern Seaboard, the possibility that next year’s Super Bowl might take place in bad weather — Super Bowl XVRNJ* will be held in New Jersey’s open-air MetLife Stadium — has been made more tangible. Prominent Pro Football Talk blogger Mike Florio used the storm as an occasion to criticize the league’s decision not to hold the game in a warm city or a dome, and he’s not the first to treat the issue as a burgeoning controversy. The New York Post has been trying to suggest that event organizers might not be able to put a halftime show; Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco called the choice of MetLife “retarded”, but only because reporters asked him about it at Super Bowl media day.

Meanwhile, fans are taking to Twitter en masse to express their concern that Super Bowl’s logistics could be rendered overly complicated by several inches of rain or sleet on game da — [furrows brow, re-checks Twitter search] — that is, their worries about a storm’s impact on the game-week schedule of networking events for NFL sponsors and heavy hitters in the world of sports commer — [scratches head, stares at empty document titled “Twitter fan complaints”] — er, their sympathy for writers and broadcasters who might have to bring an extra few pairs of socks to the — ah, what am I saying: no actual humans are worried about any of those things at all.

Indeed, The Real Dan Hatab (if that is your real Dan Hatab name) — you are an American Hero for standing up to this non-story. And while there are many other Joe Sixpacks online on Real Dan’s side, there doesn’t seem to be ANYONE on the internet, except for paid writers, complaining that bad weather at the Super Bowl would be anything but great news. Which makes sense — many of the NFL’s most historically memorable games, from the Tuck Rule Raiders-Patriots classic to the Bears-Eagles Fog Bowl to John Elway’s playoff comeback drive down a chewed-up, muddy field in the Cleveland cold, are memorable in part because of the conditions they were played in. In addition to providing a more spectacular TV experience, bad weather always seems to make the stadium crowd goofier and more energetic — which is just the kind of thing that the Super Bowl’s staid corporate audience could probably use. While no one’s rooting for a genuinely destructive or dangerous storm, it doesn’t seem like anyone would have anything to lose from a little winter weather excitement at next year’s game.